The mainstream media spent much of last week trying to manufacture yet another scandal involving President Donald Trump — but according to a new report from Politico, their plan may have backfired.
What began as an effort to accuse Trump of attempting to convince Ukrainian officials to investigate Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings ended up drawing a lot of unwanted attention to the now-2020 hopeful, Politico reports.
Biden on the ropes
Some have alleged that when he was vice president, Joe Biden threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless they cut ties with a prosecutor who was investigating Hunter Biden.
And according to Politico, attempts to paint Trump as the bad guy for reviving these allegations have raised concerns that more will be uncovered about the Bidens’ past.
“This puts [Biden] on the ropes over having to talk about this. He certainly doesn’t want to talk about this, his family,” Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray told Politico.
“At the primary level, I don’t think Democrats would believe these charges [concerning Biden] because of how polarized the debate is right now, but then they could start worrying that this could hurt him if he is the nominee,” Murray explained. “Can Biden fight back? Will this hurt his ability to take Trump on fully? And will it undermine that electability argument that he’s been making?”
Ties to Ukraine
Indeed, while there was nothing to support the breathless allegations about Trump trying to make a deal with the Ukrainian government, there is something to the allegations that Hunter Biden enriched himself while employed by a Ukrainian energy company.
Following the Russian annexation of Crimea and the civil war that broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Joe Biden was named the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, according to Politico. Around that same time, Hunter Biden was hired for a lucrative gig — that reportedly paid around $50,000 per month — with a natural gas company known as Burisma, despite having no real experience in either Ukraine or the energy sector.
Burisma was owned by a Ukrainian oligarch named Mykola Zlochevsky, who ultimately came under investigation by Ukraine’s prosecutor general Viktor Shokin. But in 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine unless the government fired Shokin and closed the investigation into Burisma, according to some reports.
Looking forward
Unfortunately for the 2020 hopeful, Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings have made even mainstream headlines over the years, and the former vice president himself is on video bragging about his interference in Ukraine, so it’d be hard for Biden to paint these allegations as “fake news.”
All Biden can really hope for now is that his allies in the liberal media will choose to look the other way and not dig any deeper into the alleged scandals involving his family — which, by the way, don’t involve just Ukraine or just his son. But will they ultimately choose to turn the other cheek?
Only time will tell.
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